October 12, 2009

Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition."We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent," said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. "As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

To purposefully disguise opinion as fact means you are propaganda. And that is what Fox is. They should be forced to remove NEWS from their name.Maybe Rep. Grayson should open a can of whoopass on them.In yet another episode of "Great Minds Blog Alike," see maru's excsllent post about this below.

5 comments:

The damn NYTs sure gave a soft-ball treatment to Fox News in the link.. they often portrayed it as simply a 'he-said/she-said' type of dispute, instead of listing some of the brown-shirt type of attacks. And as usual, they didn't offer any factual corrections to Fox's ubiquitous propaganda/lies -- even when it's Fox's bragging about their supposed #1 news ratings status. When you check that claim out, for instance, you quickly find that Fox is actually ONLY referring to CABLE news viewership, which "...By the most basic measure, ratings, network nightly news still dwarfs cable. In 2008, night in and night out, the 22.8 million viewers who on average watched the three nightly newscasts was nearly seven times larger than the combined audience of the three main cable news channels at any given moment in prime time (3.5 million viewers)*"

And even within cable, Fox and CNN are often neck-and-neck. To me all it shows is that there's 1 or 2 million greedy/simplistic assholes in this country who regularly tune into Fox - - not especially noteworthy in a country of 300 million people.

(* easily found in Googling, this particular quote is from: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_networktv_audience.php?cat=2&media=6 )